Anthropic

Local alternatives to Claude Sonnet

Anthropic's balanced workhorse — the everyday coding and agentic model.

Sonnet trades a little of Opus's ceiling for speed and cost, which is exactly the niche mid-size open-weight models fill best. These are the community-regarded closest local models by capability class:

These are community-regarded closest open-weight models by capability class — an editorial judgement, not a benchmark ranking. Sizes and hardware/speed figures are derived from the catalog and the same fit engine used across the site, judged at a 8,192-token context. Speeds are estimates, not measurements.

Coding & software engineering use case: coding

Mid-size open coding models that run comfortably on a single 24 GB desktop GPU are the closest practical stand-ins for Sonnet's day-to-day coding.

Local model Size Hardware to run it Est. speed
Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct Qwen tags: Coding, Long context 30.5B (MoE) Runs fully on 20 GB (RX 7900 XT) at IQ4_XS Runs fully on GPU @ IQ4_XS · 8K ctx 184–246 tok/s (estimate)

General & agentic

For Sonnet-style balanced generalist and tool-use work, these mid-size open instruct models are the community's usual local choices.

Local model Size Hardware to run it Est. speed
Qwen3-32B Qwen 32.8B Runs fully on 24 GB (RTX 4090) at Q4_K_M Runs fully on GPU @ Q4_K_M · 8K ctx 28–37 tok/s (estimate)
Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 Qwen tags: Long context 30.5B (MoE) Runs fully on 24 GB (RTX 4090) at Q4_K_M Runs fully on GPU @ Q4_K_M · 8K ctx 213–284 tok/s (estimate)
Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506 mistralai 24B Runs fully on 16 GB (RTX 5060 Ti 16GB) at Q4_K_M Runs fully on GPU @ Q4_K_M · 8K ctx 19–25 tok/s (estimate)
gpt-oss-20b openai 21.5B (MoE) Runs fully on 16 GB (RTX 5060 Ti 16GB) at F16 Runs fully on GPU @ F16 · 8K ctx 77–103 tok/s (estimate)

"Hardware to run it" is the smallest single GPU in our roster that runs the model's best-fitting quant fully on GPU at this context, computed by the same fit engine used sitewide. "Est. speed" is a modelled generation-throughput range labelled estimate (D8), never a measurement. Equivalence is a conservative editorial call and no benchmark scores are implied.